This is just a quick tirade. The blog sites and forums are buzzing with rumors that the new Motorola Droid X will be shipping with eFUSE that will protect the phone from any customization that messes with the guts of the phone (aka you installing a custom ROM would brick your phone). Now there is no evidence of anything happening yet and eFUSE has shipped with other phones, but it sounds like it wasn't enabled. No matter how this turns out, I hope other hardware manufacturers don't look to follow suit. Even having the option there sucks. I hope the geek buyers out there will watch this sort of thing and avoid those phones to send a message to manufacturers; however, the masses aren't geeks and they won't care what they buy so it probably won't matter anyways. I had an original Motorola Droid (that had e-FUSE, but wasn't put into use) and loved it. Mine had good build quality and I loved vanilla Android (I am not a fan of other UIs including Sense). I would love to buy another Motorola phone in future, but with this sort of shenanigans, I will be staying away from Motorola for now.
I wish the Nexus One was on a CDMA carrier (AT&T and T-Mobile suck by me). Here's to hoping that Google will work with a hardware manufacturer to make a Nexus Two and release it on all carriers.
UPDATE 7/22/2010:
Droid X was rooted today. Now a custom ROM still hasn't been loaded, but this is a great start. I will update again as the hackers progress.
You inserted a "read more" for 2 extra sentences?
ReplyDeleteI like to get people's hopes up that we will actually write an in-depth article and then I like for them to click the link and be like "wtf". Worked on you.
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